The Field of Canadian Jewish Studies and Its Importance for the Jewish Community of Canada

The Canadian Jewish community has emerged recently as one of the more interesting and culturally creative centers of contemporary Jewish life. This article explores an aspect of that development: the evolution of Canadian Jewish studies from something almost wholly internal within the Canadian Jewish community to a phenomenon of interest to academics and community members alike. The Canadian Jewish Community has emerged in the past few decades to take its place as one of the more interesting and significant centers of Jewish life and cultural creativity in the world today.1 Because of this, it is worthwhile to outline, however briefly, the development of that community's self-understanding as an entity worth studying. This survey of the present state of Canadian Jewish studies is testimony to the contemporary fascination of the Canadian Jewish community for researchers, Jewish and non- Jewish, both in and out of the academy. However Jews in Canada did not always possess the selfunderstanding that their community constituted something significant that was worth studying. The first organized Jewish community in what would become Canada was founded in Montreal in the mid-eighteenth century. Yet until the end of the nineteenth century Jews in Canada were relatively few in number and were dependent, culturally and in many other ways, on the Jewish communities of England, the mother country, and the much larger Jewish community in the U.S. to the south. In this respect the self-consciousness of Canadian Jews paralleled that of Canada as a whole: that which was culturally significant was not likely to be native to Canada, but imported from somewhere else. In the early twentieth century, the Canadian Jewish community's situation began to change on account of the mass migration of Eastern European Jews to North America and elsewhere. Canada did not receive nearly as many Jews as the U.S., and Jews began arriving in significant numbers somewhat later than to the country south of the border. Nonetheless, by the beginning of the twentieth century, Eastern European Jewish immigrants to Canada quickly created Jewish communities of demographic significance in large cities and smaller settlements from coast to coast. In the eyes of one keen observer of this scene in 1914, the journalist and scholar Judah Kaufman, Canadian Jewry, despite the existence of a small, largely acculturated Jewish community prior to the Eastern European migration, was young; it was practically in its first generation. It had not yet established institutions of significance, nor did it possess any literature of its own other than journalistic. In this, he opined, it was not essentially different from Canada as a whole.2 But this situation was to change swiftly. By the 1920s Canadian Jews, again in parallel with Canada as a whole, had begun to understand themselves to be members of a separate community with its own identity. This understanding was spurred by the 1919 meeting of the Canadian Jewish Congress in Montreal and the founding of Jewish institutions of all sorts by a cadre of people, many of whom, particularly in Montreal, were followers of Labor Zionist ideology.3 These activists, whose working language was Yiddish, understood that they were making history and rapidly began publishing, as early as the 1920s, works like Abraham Rhinewine's Der 'id in Kanade [The Jew in Canada].4 Another pioneering work of the 1920s compiled and edited by Arthur Daniel Hart in English was The Jew in Canada: A Complete Record of Canadian Jewry from the Days of the French Regime to the Present Time.5 In the 1930s, the Canadian Jewish Congress, which had renewed itself in 1934 in the face of rising anti-Semitism at home and the threat of Nazism abroad, turned to the scientific study of the social and demographic structure of the Canadian Jewish community, and entrusted this task to one of its staff, Louis Rosenberg. His book, Canada 's Jews: A Social and Economic Study of the Jews of Canada,6 stands out as the first comprehensive portrait of the demographic, economic, and social reality of Canadian Jewry. …

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